The following pieces compose the beginning of my personal essay collection,
The Last Reasonable Hour.


"The Dark Room"

--Published in Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Fall 2002 issue (Volume 4, Number 2)


In 1980, when I was nine years old, my mother had a hysterectomy. I seem to have been anesthetized during the week of her hospitalization: I don't remember missing her, I don't remember feeling that she had been taken from me. Her homecoming from the hospital must have sparked a flurry of activity—my sister Anne tucking pillows behind Mom's back and running to fetch the TV remote, my father heading downstairs to smoke in the basement so that Mom wouldn't split her belly open, coughing—but I can't recall the day she came home. I remember the days afterward, when Anne and my brother, Danny, went to school, my father to work, leaving me alone with Mom.

I remember how the whole house ached, with Mom's pain at its center. She lay on the couch, a thin yellow blanket covering her legs and her bandaged belly. The air seemed to throb with hurt, the way it did when Mom got angry. She wasn't shouting at anybody now; she lay there, immobilized by something that was stronger and angrier than she was.

It was my job to keep her company while she convalesced. I hovered at the edge of the living room at first, unnerved by the thought of getting near her. My assignment had come about by process of elimination: my two oldest sisters, Carmen and Denise, were living what I imagined to be thrilling collegiate lives in New York State, too engrossed in fall-semester midterms to come home to Vermont; Danny and Anne were similarly busy with high school, tackling trigonometry and oil painting and World Lit. My father couldn't afford to lose any sales commissions from the car dealership, and even if he could have taken time off, my mother didn't consider men to be capable of caregiving; she would have found fault with his every clumsy gesture. We lived at the end of a dirt road, our patch of land bordered by cow pastures on three sides; beyond the pastures lay a dark, dense wood which held all my fears of monsters and bogeymen in it s tangle of branches. Two other houses were visible through the big bay wind ow that faced the road: little ranch homes like ours, each sealed tight with its own troubles; we hardly knew those families. The mothers had day jobs, as did my mother's sisters, who lived in the next town, ten miles north. It often seemed to Mom that she was the last housewife left on the planet.

As for me, I was gliding through the fourth grade, a so-called "gifted child." If I missed a few days, even a whole week, my parents must have figured I could easily slip back to writing reports on Michelangelo, maybe work a little harder to catch up on long division (my "gift" did not extend to mathematics). Although I was miffed that my siblings' educations were considered to be at a more crucial stage than mine, I didn't mind staying home. The speech therapist at my school had determined that I spoke with a lisp—a deficiency so slight that neither my family nor my merciless classmates had ever picked up on it—and she'd set me up for twice-weekly torment with a student therapist, Darlene. Darlene seemed to dislike children as deeply as she loved the sound of her own smooth "s"; her cold eyes narrowed as my lisp and my shyness grew worse under her supervision. Being left alone all day with Mom and her pain was vastly preferable to being cooped up for an hour with Darlene.

"Marcia?"

Mom's voice was hoarse, as if her throat had been scraped raw. I ventured closer to the couch.

"Come sit." She patted the edge of the cushions. "Just don't lean on me."

I struggle now to recall what her face looked like as she invited me to sit. Does a child ever really see her parent? To me, my mother was more a pervasive force than a person: all industry and anger. She cooked, she cleaned— and she yelled. She yelled at my father for spending the mortgage payment on a garden tractor; she yelled at the dog for sneaking up onto the couch; she yelled at us children for tracking mud across her freshly mopped linoleum. I'd be playing in my room, and suddenly her muscular, almost masculine shout would bruise the quiet: “Je-sus Christ." “What in the HELL?" “Bullshit!” The yelling scared me, although I couldn't have said what it was that I was scared of. As the youngest child, I occupied a special place, protected from Mom's anger. She never hit me; my parents never hit each other. Still, my mother's tirades were a kind of onslaught, a rain of verbal blows that seemed to demand an equally forceful response. Most of those blows landed on Dad.

When my father came home from the garage, he'd settle into "his" chair like Archie Bunker, cigarette smoke wafting around his head as if to ward us off like mosquitoes. It worked with us: we scattered the moment he picked up the remote control. He couldn't ward off Mom. Edith-like in the first guilty moments of seeing Dad exhausted after working all day, Mom would bring him a can of beer. Then she'd sit across from him on the couch to chat, and something he'd say would inevitably set her off. Usually it was about money: he'd bounced a check, lost several rounds of poker at deer camp. Or maybe he'd invited a whole bunch of relatives over for supper the next night without asking Mom if she felt like cooking for six extra people. Always, from Mom's point of view, there was some kind of betrayal that she found intolerable. "What! . . . No goddamned way," was a generally useful response to whatever my father wanted to do, or wanted her to do. Quivering behind my closed bedroom door, I could hear my father's voice only as a low rumble; he rarely yelled back. It never occurred to me to wonder why he didn't yell back; I only wondered how his eardrums didn't burst. Later, I would come to recognize his lack of response not as restraint, but apathy: he simply wanted to be left alone with his beer and the evening news. The apathy was what stirred my mother to ever-greater levels of fury, her voice growing louder and louder, until she either spent her store of rage or stormed into the kitchen to slam pots and pans around in preparation for supper (no matter how angry she got, no matter how much we dreaded eating in the midst of her sullen silence, she had supper on the table by six).
 
Now Mom lay still, stifled, pinned to one spot by pain. I must have looked at her, sitting as close as I was; but I have no clear image of her face. I do remember her asking, in a voice tinged with apology, "Can you get Mom some ginger ale?" as if I were four years old. Can you handle that big glass bottle with your own little hands? Can you pour without spilling? Although I was just a few months away from turning ten, I was ignorant of the most basic household tasks. My mother demanded full domestic participation from my older sisters, but all she asked of me was that I toss my dirty underwear into the clothes hamper each night and wipe down the kitchen appliances with Windex once a week. I was my mother's baby, and she couldn't seem to help spoiling me: singing me silly little songs, buying me candy and cheap toys every time we stopped at the grocery store, calling me Sweet Stuff and Baby Doll and any other gooey endearment she could think of. She lavished all of her tenderness on the last child she was ever going to have, as if she were trying to keep me a child as long as she could. She'd had my sisters and brother "like stairs": four babies in as many years, no time or inclination left for coddling; my siblings grew up as self-reliant as I was inept. If my sisters had been at home, Mom would have asked one of them to fetch her ginger ale. If she were her usual, unstoppable self she would have been in the kitchen, firing up a can of Campbell's soup for my lunch. She could not simply say, "Would you get me some ginger ale?" She couldn't admit that she was weak enough to need my help.

I was thrilled that she thought me even remotely capable of waiting on her. The aura of my mother's pain receded as I eased the bottle of Schwepp's from its place on the refrigerator shelf, next to the 12-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Tipping the bottle with both hands, I watched the ginger ale trickle into a juice glass, as vigilant as if I were handling radioactive waste. See? I could pour without spilling. I was of use. Triumphant, I returned to the living room to find her whimpering as she tried to sit up.

"Put a magazine under that glass," she grunted. "I don't want a ring on my coffee table. Good. Now, can you just grab those painkillers? Right there." She pointed at a prescription bottle on the end table. I stared at it; I wasn't supposed to touch prescription bottles. Ever. "Right there," she repeated. I handed Mom the bottle, watched as she tapped a couple of pills onto her palm. Painkillers. I liked the fierce sound of that. Those little tablets like pieces of chalk left from the chalkboard but perfectly round and full of danger: they would kill her pain. She tossed them back in her throat and chased them with a sip of ginger ale. "You're my good girl, taking care of Mom. You're my little nurse."

Her long, white fingers grasped mine, the bones closing in tight. My hand felt pinched, but I didn't move. As the painkillers took effect, Mom's fingers relaxed. It was the first time I saw a prescription drug work its clean, quick, odorless magic. This was not like drinking: Dad puking just-eaten oysters in the hallway inches from the tiled bathroom floor, the sound of round splatters dulled by the carpet; Mom slamming a potful of mashed potatoes on the burner and knocking over her glass of beer in the process; Mom, her speech just slightly slurred as though she were a talking doll running on dying batteries, half-dragging Dad who's completely polluted up the basement stairs, clutching him by elbow and armpit, bearing most of his weight for a couple of steps, then, "Goddamnit, you're going to make me fall," shoving him against the wall so that he has to grab the banister. I hated the sight and smell of alcohol. A white-capped glass of beer looked like the foamy piss Dad left in the toilet after he stumbled off to bed. Vodka, which Dad drank and Mom eschewed (she didn't care for "hard" liquor) was worse in its way: it didn't stink when it sat clear and crisp as spring water in a glass, but on the breath it was combustible. Pills, however, were odorless. They did not leave empty cans or bad breath in their wake. Tiny, hard, contained, they slipped down the throat and softened the body; they made everything relaxed and easy. I didn't want Mom to drink, but I loved bringing her the pills. Emboldened by that first assist, I began to offer them before she could ask.


I was sure I'd never seen Mom weakened, wounded like this, until I remembered what I didn't want to remember.

An image of my mother, glimpsed so briefly it had been easy to forget: One afternoon, a couple of years earlier, I found Mom sitting in the finished basement room, snuffling against her closed fist. Astonishment froze me for a long moment—Mom, crying?—until she looked up. "Go and have Carmen make your lunch."

The basement room, its tiny windows eye-level with the lawn, was dark in the middle of the day. We called it the "family room." Dad had nailed real barnboard onto the walls; Mom had knelt for hours stroking deep brown paint onto the cement floor. But nothing could disguise the fact that this was the basement, the bottom, the damp space that yawned beneath us. The couch that huddled in front of the TV smelled dank. Dad's quilt-patterned recliner stank of old cigarette smoke and little spills of vodka. I touched Mom's sleeve. "Go upstairs, now," she insisted. There were no backs on the stairs, no railing; at least Mom had tacked ribbed plastic protectors onto each step. Climbing those stairs always scared me; I imagined monsters grabbing my feet, I saw myself falling backward into empty space. Then I emerged into another world. In the light-filled kitchen my oldest sister, Carmen, straight dark hair dipping down the middle of her back, asked if I wanted a grilled cheese sandwich. Calm and capable, she slathered two pieces of white bread with margarine, put slices of Velveeta in between, and pressed the sandwich flat against the spitting pan with a spatula. She was 17; I was 7. She must have known what the trouble was, down to the last detail, the last penny, the last drink. I never knew details; I only had my dim, damp sense of things. Many years later, with Carmen's help, I would come to believe that I understood the varied sources of my mother's despair—loneliness, exhaustion, financial worries, all compounded by alcohol (I say this now, knowing I can never really know)—but at 17, Carmen didn't offer insight into that particular day's crisis, and at 7, I didn't ask.


Except for that single, swiftly forgotten incident, before the hysterectomy it had never occurred to me that Mom might need relief from pain. The mother I knew was too busy to hurt, too strong and able to require anybody's help; her anger seemed to me an extension of her strength. She built pies from scratch: peeling and chopping a bagful of apples, flattening the crust into tender, silky sheets, adding dashes of cinnamon and nutmeg with quick jerks of her hand. She dragged wet laundry out to the clothesline so that they could absorb the smell of sun. Trembling on a ladder high above the stairwell, she pasted pale wallpaper over the turquoise paint favored by the house's previous owner, preferring to risk her neck rather than endure that shrill color.

All of this dicing and hauling and bravery on ladders tricked me into believing that Mom enjoyed homemaking, that she was born to it. Her skill and persistence fueled my Little House on the Prairie fantasies: I longed to be Laura, so I convinced myself that Mom was Ma, only with modern appliances. We were a warm, loving, hearty brood just like the Ingalls. Weren't we? I could pretend that the Holsteins that sometimes broke through fences and trampled our vegetable garden belonged to us and not to the farmer down the road. I could believe that the roasted chicken being sawed apart at our supper table had been killed by my father that very afternoon on a backyard stump. I could watch the skies for blizzards and hail­storms and grasshopper plagues, secure in the knowledge that even if the crops failed, within the four walls of our house our family was inviolable.

Mom was neither the stern, unflinching Ma of the Little House books nor the perpetually moist-eyed, angelic Ma of the TV series. Family was the center of her life, but she didn't surrender herself to us wholeheartedly. Whereas either Ma would have kept any complaints to herself, my mother never sugar-coated her disdain for the daily tedium of cooking, laundry, dusting—yet her pleasure in the finished product, in the hot meal fed to hungry children, the stack of precisely folded shirts laid in a dresser drawer, the kitchen restored to order after dinner with the counters slick-wet and shining, was evident in her expression: a look of shy triumph, like a schoolgirl too modest to gloat about winning the spelling bee. The only job she loved unequivocally was decorating: she needed to continually reinvent the spaces we lived in with paint and paper and carpet, needed the hard work of spreading herself across a big canvas; it was her one indulgence. Not one of my mother's pregnancies had been planned, each had presented itself as a new burden—yet it was the pregnancies, the difficult labors, the burden of raising too many children that gave shape to her life. She drew deep satisfaction from knowing that we depended on her for everything, that we had been born because of her and survived because of her—"I made every one of you," she would gloat years later, the lipsticked matriarch with all five of her grown children gathered around a restaurant table on a rare night out—and she wondered what else she might have accomplished in her life if she hadn't lost herself in caring for us. I have wondered about that, too; I always will.


Mom propped herself up at a gentle incline to watch Wheel of Fortune. I fished recent copies of the Ladies Home Journal out of the magazine rack, folded the "Living" section of the newspaper into quarters so that Mom could work the crossword puzzle. A kind of peace settled over us. I closed the drapes against the glittering autumn sunshine while Mom napped. The house was quiet once I turned off the TV; our phone never rang much. I rounded up dirty juice glasses, polished the living-room furniture with lemon-scented Pledge, scooped Ken-L-Ration into the dog's dish. I had never thought much about somebody not being able to move around; now I felt grateful for my good strong legs, my hands that could do so much, pick up and put away and straighten.

Mom got up only to use the bathroom, crying out softly as she lifted herself. I brought her light foods: vanilla pudding, white toast thinly spread with margarine. She was losing weight. Drinking beer had given her a belly over the past few years, straining the seams of her polyester stretch pants. Later I would discover that her weight embarrassed my teenaged sisters. It didn't embarrass me, at nine. That soft body, improbably held up by long, milky legs as slender as a fashion model's, was the only version of mother I had ever known until now. This Mom who lay on the couch resembled the mother in the photographs taken before I was born. In those pictures a skinny young woman, determinedly smiling a bright-red-lipsticked smile, and a skinny, solemn-faced young man sit on opposite ends of a sofa, with a row of plump babies between them. Every year, for four years, another baby. With each one the distance between the man and the woman grows wider. Those skinny people were my brother and sisters' parents. Now Mom looked like that woman in the pictures, paste-white and delicate, except there was no smile, no red lips.

Once, when she was about to change the dressing on her incision, she asked, "Do you want to see it? If not, you'd better look away." I couldn't look away. She raised the hem of her nightgown, pushed the waistband of her white nylon panties down past her belly, then peeled off strips of surgical tape. Lifting the large sheet of gauze, she bared it to me: a long, red ribbon of flesh, the edges sewn together with wiry black thread like the seams of a dress turned inside out. The sight sent a shiver down the back of my neck. "This is how you were born: they cut me open and took you out. That's a Caesarean. Danny and Anne were born the same way. Think of that—the doctors have cut my belly open four times." I had seen scalpels on TV, and I imagined a surgeon slicing her belly in half like a round pot roast.

Before I could get used to seeing where I'd come from, she taped on a fresh piece of gauze, and I knew that the subject of babies was closed; I always knew better than to ask about that. My parents freely made crude sexual jokes in my hearing, correctly assuming that I wouldn't know what they were talking about. I absorbed the message long before I understood the words: something ridiculous lurked between the legs of men, something equally absurd hid between the legs of women, and the clumsy something they did together made babies. All of it was so unspeakably embarrassing that plain language delivered without winks and sniggers couldn't describe it.

My mother's brash sexual slang failed to disguise the shame she felt toward her own body. I never saw her wearing anything less than her chaste white-nylon underwear; I'd never gotten a good look at her bare belly until now. This was what being a woman was: strange secrets and terrible injuries, scars on top of scars. The word for my mother's operation was hysterectomy—a name for something vital ripped from its roots. I knew that it meant my mother couldn't have any more babies, but I didn't know what it was that was gone, I didn't understand what it was that we both had lost.

Covering herself again with her nightgown, my mother gave me one final piece of information: "This hurts more than a Caesarean. A lot more. A baby's meant to come out sometime, you know, but organs are supposed to stay in you forever."

I felt jealous, hearing that. Pain had driven my mother down into a dark room to cry; now it confined her to the couch, rendered her unable to sit up without wincing. I didn't want my mother to suffer, but I wanted to be the most important thing in her life. If the hysterectomy hurt her more than the Caesarean that had produced me, then it mattered more than my birth. Children dance in a strange balance between empathy and self-absorption: I felt my mother's pain in the very air we breathed, felt it quiver in me—and still it angered me that I was not the center of her universe. I saw that my mother had a life which was distinct from mine, that her body was vulnerable; she was vulnerable. That wound in her belly was my first clue that she would not endure forever, not even for me.




"Pioneers"

--Published in Full Circle: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, Spring 2004 online issue


His smoker’s growl cut through the blare of the TV set, interrupting my Saturday-morning cartoonfest over white-powdered donuts.                                                         

“You come help me in the garden," Daddy said. "Christ. It’s a goddamned gorgeous day. Can’t waste it watchin that shit." He yanked the drapes open, filling the room with obnoxious sunshine. It was clear he wasn’t going to leave me alone.

Imitating my teenaged sister’s gusty sigh, I got up and smacked the TV’s on/off knob with the heel of my hand. The screen hissed like a dripped-on skillet. It was the middle of July 1979, five weeks before the start of third grade; and the northwestern corner of Vermont was drenched in humidity, the kind that made you want to take off your whole skin and wring it out in the sink after five minutes outdoors. I was planning on taking it easy before being forced to sweat through soccer drills and rope climbing in phys-ed class come late August. Apparently my father had other ideas. What was wrong with staying inside all day? Didn’t my father know that they pumped milk full of Vitamin D so that kids didn’t have to bake in the sun anymore?  

I couldn’t refuse him outright. Generally mild-mannered, Daddy had an unnerving tendency to blow up over minor acts of disobedience. I could look pissed-off all I wanted, but if I failed to get up at his request, he might start hollering. Then again, he might not. Daddy’s fury was that much more unsettling for its unpredictability. He liked to brag about how he’d given each of his children such a "good spanking" when we were small that we never needed another one. It was true that I had received my first and last series of slaps on the bottom when I was two, one day when my defiant "no" struck the wrong chord in him; and although that spanking wasn’t especially harsh or long-lasting, it was also true that I’d never forgotten it.

"What do you want me to do out there, anyway?"

Daddy stared at me through his black-rimmed glasses, which matched his hair. Their thick lenses made his eyes look startlingly large. "You can pull weeds, cain’tcha? You can water."    

"Yeah," I muttered. Of course I could do those things; I wasn’t crippled. The real question, the one I dared not ask for fear of sparking an ugly lecture, was: why should my father demand help with what qualified as his weekend hobby? It wasn’t as though we’d starve without his efforts. Whatever happened to the produce section at Martin’s Foods? As a passionate carnivore and unrepentant sugar-junkie, I couldn’t have cared less whether we had vegetables at all. I refused to eat potatoes unless they were French-fried, hash-browned, or whipped smooth enough for a stroke victim. I would never consume an actual tomato; tomato sauce had to contain enough corn syrup or ground beef to render its base ingredient virtually unrecognizable. In general, I would eat nothing greener than iceberg lettuce, unless you counted lime Jell-O and the iced leaves on birthday-cake flowers. My sisters seemed to enjoy helping in the garden, but they ate what they grew. If we’d had a tree that sprouted Fruit Roll-Ups, I would have gladly been out there with a ladder and a bushel basket.

As the surprise baby in a family of five kids, I was used to having my mother and sisters wait on me; I was unused to being asked to do anything. The rest of the family stayed busy. It was the late seventies, but the feminist revolution had failed to rattle the basic tenets of work division in our household: Daddy brought home the paycheck, Mom was, as she sheepishly put it, a "housewife," that rapidly shrinking species. My father and brother mowed the grass, stacked wood for the stove, and generally hammered on things whenever they needed hammering. My mother wrangled heaps of laundry into the washer and dryer; after supper each night, she and my three sisters descended on the torn-up kitchen with the stoic efficiency of medics mopping up a battlefield. (One sister was strong, athletic, and able to fix just about anything, so she often took on the men’s work; if she hadn’t also shown a sincere interest in baking, sewing, and applying makeup, my parents might have worried.) As for me, I read novels and watched Gilligan’s Island: this was my job. If my family viewed me as dreamy, bookish and largely incapable of tasks requiring manual dexterity, so much the better.

My parents came of age in the fifties and started their family in the early sixties. We did not have "family meetings;" if we could not contain our feelings, we expressed ourselves in the form of shouting or tears (in my case, before the onset of adolescence, it was usually tears). My father figured that his obligation to his children began and ended with the paycheck he handed over to my mother every Friday. Sometimes, he just plain wanted to get away from all of us, this horde of (mostly) women chattering, whimpering, arguing; he sought refuge in his basement workshop, in gardening, fishing, and hunting. Then, all of a sudden, he would decide that he wanted our company. My mother sometimes joined him in the garden, but she had zero interest in his other hobbies; she preferred to spend her precious spare time reading mysteries, movie-star biographies, and accounts of Watergate, pausing to look up unfamiliar words in the big, fake-leather-bound Funk and Wagnall’s dictionary and scribble their definitions in a notebook. As for my siblings, they were busy with jobs and term papers and after-school activities, in addition to regular household chores. When they weren’t available for my father’s folksy pursuits, that left me—the kid who was least inclined toward outdoor adventure.

Daddy couldn’t get over the fact that he had spawned a child like me. He was suitably impressed that I got straight A’s in school—“Pretty damned good," he’d grunt when Mom held up my quarterly report card directly in front of his face, to distract him from the evening news—but he would have preferred a kid who didn’t have to be dragged away from the World Book encyclopedia. What was wrong with me? he must have wondered. I begged to be taken down to the lake in hot weather, but I hadn’t yet learned to swim; instead I dipped myself inch by inch into the water, squealing that it was too cold, screaming if I saw a fish dart around my ankles. My sisters and brother urged me to immerse myself all at once, assuring me that the cold shock would dissipate quickly. My father had another theory: he once threatened to throw me off the end of the dock, so that I’d have no time to think about the water’s temperature, no choice but to figure out how to swim; that idea earned him my tears and my mother’s glower.

Daddy made a handful of futile attempts to include me in his outings. One winter, an ice-fishing trip culminated in my weeping at the mournful sound of dying fish slapping around in the bucket. Vulnerable creatures had the power to rouse me from self-absorption: wailing toddlers, birds with hurt wings, whining dogs with belly aches. My tenderness in the face of minor tragedy both tickled and annoyed my father, who had an outdoorsman’s appreciation of the give-and-take relationship between animals and people. "Where you think fish sticks come from? Prob’ly think eggs come right from the store insteada out a hen’s ass."

He mystified me as much as I mystified him. What pleasure did he get from breathing in cigarette smoke, which made me cough and gag? Why did he have to use excruciatingly loud tools like chain saws and electric drills in his workshop (I never could tell what he was working on; I rarely ventured into the workshop, as it wasn’t uncommon to see a mouse skittering through the sawdust)? Couldn’t he find anything better to read than boring old magazines like Yankee and Organic Gardening? And how could he enjoy slaughtering defenseless wildlife? The mounted deer head which had hung over our TV set in the family room for as long as I could remember was the last one my father ever bagged, but that didn’t stop him from joining his buddies at deer camp for a long weekend every fall, nor did it stop my appeals to his compassion:

"How could you shoot at a deer? How could you?"

He laughed. "If people didn’t hunt them, they’d starve. That’d be cruel, let me tell ya."

"But they’d starve just because people keep cutting down their habitat to build more houses!" My taste in magazines ran to Ranger Rick, a call to kiddie environmentalism.

Now he’d gotten it into his head to drag me out to the garden. Evidently, my father hadn’t learned that I was never going to be of use to him. My lower lip plumped up into the beginnings of a pout, the only expression of rebellion I dared to make. My father didn’t notice; he headed into the kitchen for a beer and a fresh, red-foil pack of Winstons. At eight, I knew that there was something not quite right about the way both of my parents drank, something not right about the bags of empty beer cans and boxes of vodka bottles that piled up in the kitchen closet. My mother chastised my father for drinking beer after beer plus juice glasses of vodka on weekend afternoons, knowing he’d be wobbling around by suppertime; she claimed that her own consumption was acceptable so long as she confined it to "a few beers" in the evening. Daddy’s drinking troubled me more than Mom’s. Hers merely made her more argumentative than usual; his was like a jungle virus that caused delirium, slurring his speech, making him stumble and fall. I couldn’t understand why he drank so much. It was one more thing about him that mystified me.  

With beer and cigarettes in hand, Daddy stepped outside, assuming I was right behind him. With no opportunity for further protest, there was nothing else to do but follow. He pawed his pockets for a lighter as he walked; I tried to literally follow in his footsteps, which meant trouble. The middle part of our back lawn sat directly over the septic tank; the soggy ground stank like a stopped-up toilet. Brown murk sucked at the soles of my father’s deerskin moccasins, worn shiny-hard; and it crept over the canvas uppers of my white tennis shoes, wetting my toes each time I stepped into one of the foot-shaped puddles my father left behind. 

"My new shoes--" 

"Aw, it’s just a little water. Ain’t gonna hurt em." He swiped dismissively at the air, as if he were clearing his path of horseflies. He continued to head for the garden, leaving me to follow him if I was the hardy daughter he wanted me to be, or to run inside if I intended to remain the squeamish baby of the family. 

Although he didn’t know it, my father’s only hope of engaging me in his garden project was through books. Like my mother, I preferred story over reality, characters over people. Mad about all things Little House on the Prairie, I sometimes pretended that I was Laura Ingalls, that we drew our drinking water from a hand-dug well, that my mother stitched my flowered calico dresses with a steel needle and homespun thread, that my father’s moccasins were fashioned from the hide of a deer he’d killed with "buckshot" in the nearby woods (if my father hunted out of necessity rather than for sport, I would need to be strong like Laura and forgive him). It occurred to me that this gardening nonsense offered a rare opportunity to act out my pioneer fantasies. What if there were no Martin’s, no food anywhere except what we could catch in the woods or coax from the soil? What if scarlet fever had blinded my muscular, multitalented sister, rendering her useless outside the familiar confines of the house? What if the family’s survival depended on my father and me? 

By the time Daddy and I reached the garden, a solemn sense of duty had enveloped me. Yes! We would wrest our sustenance from the earth. All I had to do was ignore my father’s smoking, beer-drinking, and frequent, unholy use of the Lord’s name.

A few months ago, the garden was nothing more than a long section of upturned dirt, dotted with little signposts made from Popsicle sticks and empty seed packets. I was impatient; I wanted things to grow now. I wanted to watch their first stems break the surface, as though the miracle of growth could occur as rapidly as in the time-lapse films of blossoming flowers I’d seen in school. When that didn’t happen immediately, I lost interest. Now amazement stopped me in my tracks, parted my lips in an idiotic expression. Within each precise rectangle lay a tangle of leaves and vines—Eden born of Burpee seeds and cow shit. At first I was overcome by the sheer fact that this transformation had taken place in our own backyard; I would have been only slightly more stunned if aliens had pitched a tent here, fifty yards from our back door. With a little start, I remembered my father, who was busy securing his can of beer, impressing a round nest into the dirt so it wouldn’t capsize. He did this? 

Daddy was a car salesman. He spent weekdays in an over-air-conditioned, glassed-in showroom infused with the thready, synthetic smell of new upholstery, talking farmers into buying shiny pickups and sedans. I saw him leave the house every morning wearing a pale blue, button-down dress shirt, dark tie, and gray or brown slacks. Each evening he returned, complaining bitterly about the pressure his boss put on him to make sales, the piles of paperwork he had to fill out, the "tire-kickers" who wasted his time, peering at cars which they had no intention of buying. It was easy for me to forget that he’d spent boyhood summers baling hay, riding tractors, milking cows. I think now that he wanted to be the farmer instead of the guy handing over the keys and handling the paperwork, that the strain of playing the miscast role of salesman was part of what propelled him toward the bottle the moment he got home. The paycheck my mother took and put promptly in the bank had to be big enough to feed, clothe and house seven people; farming was far too risky a venture. Today Daddy was dressed in a soft, worn white undershirt, front pocket bulging with his pack of Winstons, and Bermuda shorts that revealed hairy calves--not exactly Pa Ingalls’ sweat-stained work shirt and suspendered trousers. If I didn’t have physical evidence in front of me, I never would have believed that my father was capable of creating such earthy splendor. 

He crouched in the dirt. "C’mere. Look at this." Parting a thicket of leaves with one hand, he grasped a tomato in the other and gently tugged at it until it came free. "Feel how heavy that bastard is." I cupped my palms to receive the tomato, fiery red and hot from the sun, its flesh dense with juice. My mother would slice it for supper that night, chiding my father for letting the juice stream down his chin and onto his shirt; my father would scoff at my sister for sprinkling sugar on her slice, accusing her of being unable to properly appreciate a "real," homegrown tomato the way he did, raw and unadorned.    

"And you wouldn’t even try this, wouldja? Jesus H. Christ." He shook his head. "How about them beauties?" He moved down the row to part another outgrowth of leaves, this time revealing shiny pea pods, pregnant with four or five bumps apiece. "Just as sweet, I’m tellin ya. These ain’t mushy like them goddamned frozen things you buy at the store." Unfolding the paper grocery bag he’d been carrying under his arm, he plucked a handful of pods and dropped them in. "You wait. Someday when you’re grown, you’ll come back begging." His voice rose to a squeaky feminine pitch. " ‘Oh, Dad, can I have some of them fresh garden vegetables? Aw, please can I?’" 

"I will not." My skin was already misted with sweat; my toes wriggled against the wet canvas of my shoes. I wanted to run back into the cool house, but I also wanted to understand how my father had made something edible spring from dry dirt. It was edible, I reminded myself. Studying the ripe tomato in my hands, I thought of my mother’s spaghetti sauce, forgetting that she started with canned paste. I could eat the tomato tonight at the supper table, or I could bite into it right now as if it were an apple and amaze my father. Now that we had picked it, it had begun to die, yet it felt like a still-living thing, warm and tender, plump with liquid stretching its skin. Then I caught its scent; my tongue writhed, remembering the acid gush of the tomato I once sampled as a toddler. I couldn’t like the taste just because I wanted to, or because my father insisted I should. I bent down and placed the tomato carefully in the paper bag, settling it among the pea pods. 

A tiny green shack sat at the far end of the garden, light glinting off what was left of the broken windowpane like a steady signal whose meaning I couldn’t divine. Daddy walked toward it, motioning for me to come with him. The shack used to be a fishing shanty, a day’s shelter on the frozen lake. With its charming pointed roof and dark green siding, it would have made the perfect playhouse, but Daddy used it to store garden tools. An abandoned wasps’ nest, round and papery, hung just below the eaves. Daddy wrestled with the door’s rusted latch, reached inside. As he lifted out the watering can, a black-and-white garter snake shot out from the tangle of weeds growing through one of the fishing holes in the plywood floor. I screamed, with a shrillness that might have cracked the windowpane if it hadn’t already been broken. 

Daddy laughed. "He ain’t gonna hurt’cha, for Christ’s sake." I knew that. I could look up garter snakes in my science book and see that they were harmless—that they were as defenseless as the fish I once wept for—but that didn’t mean I wanted some skinny black scaled thing slithering around my ankles. To my horror, I felt tears form in my eyes. Still snickering, Daddy handed me the plastic watering can. Laura Ingalls wouldn’t be afraid of a little garter snake, I told myself firmly; Laura Ingalls would have killed for a fresh tomato during the Long Winter. But then, I was not Laura Ingalls. I watched too much television and ate too much processed food. Daddy was a fine weekend gardener, but he was not an intrepid pioneer; he was a car salesman with an ever-present twelve-pack in the Frigidaire. We were pioneers only in that we were struggling to fathom the strange, difficult terrain of each other.  

"The hose, Marcie. Over there." Daddy pointed at the green hose, stretched snakelike in the grass. My neck stiffened at that old nickname: Marcie, as though I were five, climbing on his lap to watch Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Only my father called me Marcie; only he had ever called me that. I looked up at him and saw drops of sweat breaking out on his forehead, wet circles spreading beneath his armpits. Something in the desk-sitter’s stoop of his shoulders made me sad; I knew he wanted me to stay. I headed for the hose, checking inside the watering can for wasps, just in case.